Killing McVeigh

McVeigh heads for execution just as national debate over the death penalty is approaching a quiet boil. In the first month of the year, no fewer than four individuals who once faced death sentences were exonerated and released in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and Virginia. People like Ronnie Burrell, a mentally impaired man who walked away from the death row of Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana with $10 in prison-issue bus fare in his pocket, 14 years after being arrested with a friend for a murder neither of them committed, four years after coming within a fortnight of execution.

A new Roper poll in Illinois indicates that three-quarters of that state's residents believe innocent individuals have been executed, a stunning reappraisal of the politics of death. And an impressive majority of these Illinois residents are ready to abandon capital punishment altogether if it is replaced with life without parole; only 33 percent favor keeping the death penalty on the books. Both houses of Maryland's Legislature are giving serious consideration to a state execution moratorium like that enacted by Gov. George Ryan of Illinois. Federal moratorium legislation is also pending in the new Congress.

McVeigh's execution is sure to turn out to be a pivotal moment in this debate -- though perhaps in unexpected ways. On the one hand, McVeigh is to the death penalty what O.J. Simpson was to race in the courtroom: an exact inversion of the usual state of affairs. He is, after all, unquestionable guilty; he is white; he was well defended by a capable lawyer. He is the precise opposite of Burrell or any of the 98 other innocent death-row inmates exonerated and released in recent years. McVeigh's execution could rally capital punishment's flagging defenders.

But not necessarily: McVeigh's reveling in his own execution may sicken many Americans already in doubt about capital punishment.

How all of this plays out will have long resonance in the nation's politics. Capital punishment, and the politics of vengeance for which it is the leading edge, have long been arrows in the Republican quiver. Ironically, now that the public is asking more questions about capital punishment than ever before, it appears that some liberal Democrats aren't getting the message.

This week Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, wife of former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and now New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, declared that "it would be futile" to try to repeal the state's death penalty -- which her husband's father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, fought to the day of his defeat by George Pataki. "Frankly, I think the death penalty is not the most important issue in the world," she said -- suggesting that the young Cuomo is trying to inoculate himself against charges of excessive liberalism. And Cuomo's leading Democratic rival, state comptroller H. Carl McCall, said that he would have no problem carrying out the state's death penalty. This at a moment when even a Republican conservative like Gov. Ryan, or a traditional death-penalty state like Maryland, is reassessing the capital trial apparatus.

The New York governor's race and the Maryland Legislature seem at a far remove from Oklahoma City and the 178 empty chairs marking the Murrah memorial. Yet from the moment Timothy McVeigh drove his van up to the Murrah building, Oklahoma City found itself the unwitting crossroads of the politics of vengeance. For that, there is no closure.

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